Michael D. Yates is, I hope, a fan of “Cassiodorus” here at DailyKos.com — he did tell me at one earlier point that he liked a post of mine. At any rate, his most constructive suggestion is well worth heeding:
If Sanders and his “Sandernistas” wanted a “political revolution,” they would use his campaign to begin the long, arduous process of radical education. There would be teach-ins and public meetings in towns large and small. No political event, no protest, no rally would be fail to have an educational component. Sanders’ talking points could be used to deepen understanding, by asking questions and pushing the discussions toward fundamental causes. And connections between inequality and a host of other problems, including the environmental catastrophes that are raining down upon us and threaten the viability of human life itself, could be made. The exploitative and murderous role of the United States in the world could be debated and analyzed. The connections between race and class, and the need to confront racism head-on could be critically examined. When the right questions are asked, it becomes difficult not to begin to grasp that it is capitalism that is the root cause of inequality, the power of the billionaire class, the lack of meaningful employment, the endless wars, the rise of police states, and the utter demise of democracy.
If we did these things, it wouldn’t matter if Bernie Sanders became the Democratic nominee, nor would it matter if he became president. But if they don’t happen, if we say, as we usually do, that now is not the time for them, we have to get out the vote, they will never take place.
So OK a question for Sanders people: is this sort of thing actually happening at Sanders events yet? And, if not, then why not? I can’t claim to be much of an authority on Sanders events at this point — the only one I saw in my neighborhood (as was listed on BernieSanders.com) was apparently canceled. And I suppose there’s a logistics situation, too: are people ready to conduct teach-ins?
And another piece of advice should be heeded — this one from an older book titled Capitalist Sorcery, by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, having to do with how radical education is conducted. (Pignarre and Stengers wrote in the aftermath of the antiglobalization movement of the turn of the century.) Here is the important quote:
If anticapitalists can learn to approach what the cry from Seattle was raised against in a pertinent manner – that is to say, in a way that creates the appetite for an effective type of hold, and not a taste for veracious denunciation – perhaps they will encounter interested partners, and not lost souls who need to be converted (p. 22).
If we’re out there conducting teach-ins in radical education, we cannot be out there with the attitude that we’re going to “convert lost souls.” It has to be: you bring your opinion, I bring mine, and we attempt to deepen our understanding of how things are.
One thing is for sure: having told us that nothing would happen without a “political revolution,” Sanders won’t amount to anything — he won’t even win the nomination — without that political revolution. And “electing more Democrats” isn’t going to make the political revolution all by itself either. You need a popular uprising, and for a popular uprising your political revolution needs an educational component.
The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept (as Alex Gourevitch reminded me tonight) low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal. Clinton's campaign message isn't just for Bernie voters; it's for everyone. Expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing. When the leading candidate of the more left of the two parties is saying that -- and getting the majority of its voters to embrace that message -- the work of the American ruling class is done.
The alternative is, to put it bluntly, domestication. Sanders packs up his campaign, endorses Clinton, goes home; capital plans for some nice “free trade” agreements. And good luck with the food stamp applications!
Request for the comments: Please include in your discussion ideas of how an educational campaign could be attached to the Sanders campaign. Can we keep it constructive?
As someone who is often an audience for the disgusted, I regularly see the complaint that none of the candidates are any good, and that therefore the individual complaining will abstain from voting. None of these complainers has so far been as articulate as Elizabeth King, who makes this complaint once again in a piece for Salon put out yesterday, titled “I don’t care if no one approves: I’m a leftist feminist and I’m not voting for Clinton, Sanders or anyone in 2016.”
My first reaction upon reading this title was that hopefully there are other reasons for Elizabeth King claiming to be a leftist feminist than that she’s not voting. Not voting is a political nonentity — being a nonvoter, in itself, does not distinguish you as a participant in any political groove at all. If you don’t vote, you could be a reactionary pining for the good old days of King Louis XIV or an ecosocialist of William Morris’ persuasion, or maybe you're just apathetic. The fact that you don’t vote tells us nothing in any case.
King's proclamations that she is a leftist and a feminist in opinion are also of little importance. Politicians will say anything, and do what indicates their real opinions — thus in looking at them we are obliged to recognize that what makes us “political" is to a very small extent what we say and to a very large extent what we do.
This is not to say that King is some kind of phony — rather, actually “being political” in our society is a much more daunting task than it is made out to be. An atomized population, with little of what Robert Putnam calls “social capital,” is unlikely to “be political” when so much of “being political” is predicated upon collective action. This is what makes the “Left” in America such a problematic notion — the “Left” spends too much time and energy talking about “the Left,” and too little in discussion of what would make it valid — the working class, the public, the masses, the people, or what other term would give “the Left” a real cause.
Considering all this, King’s conclusion still seems a bit farfetched:
If we, as a culture, could open our minds to the idea that it’s OK to say no to voting if none of the candidates will work for us, we could start having a much more thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately more helpful conversation about politics.
I fail to see why not voting would start such a conversation. Noam Chomsky has already discussed in detail how little of the agenda of the political class is actually aligned with popular interests. The question in this regard is not “how should we vote” or even “should we vote” but rather “what should we do about this problem?”
What makes King's argument superior to the others, on the other hand, is that she refuses to bow to the notion that one candidate or another is “entitled" to her vote. She says:
If I don’t like a candidate and don’t stand behind their policies, I’m not going to vote for them, even if that means I’m not voting for anyone. We don’t have to support someone we don’t believe in, and we shouldn’t feel that opting out of a process we don’t believe in risks our status as a contributing member of society.
This is an important principle to stand by. No politician is entitled to our vote, and a prerequisite of any functioning democracy is that politicians need to be made to cater to the public and not vice versa. Politicians who can get by on “I’m (slightly) better than the other candidate” are not likely to do much, if anything, for you.
The idea that no politician is entitled to our vote, then, is the real conversation-starter for King, and so at some point we (like King) might look at the political class, its agenda lost in obliviousness to the real state of the world as we experience it and its representatives brimming over with entitlement and ceaseless “attacks” upon one another, and throw up our hands in despair.
And voting? Voting is hardly the stuff of principles. Voting is like anything else that's messed up, like buying insurance or like trying to avoid being oppressed by capitalism -- you make a choice because what else is there, and that's that.
This is going to have to be a quickie, as there really isn’t much time left in the day and so much to do.
At any rate, have any of you read Purcell-Gates and Waterman’s Now We Read, We See, We Speak? It’s a fascinating account of literacy classrooms in El Salvador after the war of the 1980s. The students learn how to read and write thorugh “generative themes,” (p. 14) and these themes become the basis for both literacy and for lively discussion around “core issues” (op. cit.).
At any rate, I thought it might be worthwhile to pursue a generative theme here, for the purpose of moving what appears to be a series of bouts of combative interaction toward (at least a little bit) the goals of Freirean education: authentic dialogue and “reading the word and the world” (pp. 12-13).
Today’s generative theme, appropriately enough, is “whispering campaign.” Wikipedia suggests:
A whispering campaign or whisper campaign is a method of persuasion in which damaging rumors or innuendo are spread about the target, while the source of the rumors seeks to avoid being detected while spreading them (for example, a political campaign might distribute anonymous flyers attacking the other candidate).
So what we can tell, right away, is that a “whispering campaign” is a particular type of campaign, typically a political campaign, which uses rumor to advance its cause. Wikipedia continues:
It is generally considered unethical in open societies, particularly in matters of public policy. The speed and anonymity of communication made possible by modern technologies like the Internet has increased public awareness of whisper campaigns and their ability to succeed. This phenomenon has also led to the failure of whisper campaigns, as those seeking to prevent them are able to publicize their existence much more readily than in the past. Whisper campaigns are defended in some circles as an efficient mechanism for underdogs who lack other resources to attack the powerful.
What we can say from reading this is that whispering campaigns thrive off of a certain type of publicity, and that the ability of that publicity to succeed is changed by the increased (and increasing) prominence of the Internet.
Since this is an attempt to provoke an Internet discussion, I should ask for primarily enlightening comments, comments which seek to bring new and more interesting forms of information to more people. At any rate, this is my example of a generative theme fit for DailyKos.com — there may be more, depending upon how this works out, what people tell me, and my mood at any particular time.
To be sure, the title of this piece in yesterday's Naked Capitalism (by Nathan Tankus) is complete clickbait — but the article itself has some substance and ought to be read carefully.
The piece is only tangentially about the Clintons. The Clintons are in this piece so that Tankus can say things like “to the liberal commentariat the status quo is irrevocably right wing and politicians like Obama and Clinton are simply ‘grappling’ with this reality.”
The piece is really about crackpot realism, the idea that across-the-board political reality is based on presuppositions which are accepted by all political players as “realistic,” but which are otherwise completely insane. The idea behind crackpot realism is to make insane situations seem normal. Here’s the key sentence at the end:
It’s the realism of the psych ward that says we’ll solve climate change, help ordinary people and build a workable economy by supporting an endless series of politicians who care less and less about the issues that matter and exploit hopeful supporters more and more cynically.
The next sentence is even more compelling:
Admonishing young people for both not voting and desiring anything other than a debt-crippled, climatologically-unstable future feels more like admonishing serfs for being insufficiently pious and for caring about what happens to themselves or their children on this plane of existence. In short, realism is just a code word for “shut up, sit down and be quiet”.
One key understanding to be taken from a recognition of being dominated by crackpot realism is this: it doesn’t matter what your politicians or their supporters or even the so-called critics say anymore. Want to know what will happen? Find out where the money is coming from, and to whom it’s going. Self-righteous grandstanding for foreign-policy “realism” amid a pointless war in 135 countries, and further grandstanding for “progressive incrementalism” amid unstopped slow-motion planetary doom, can only add a veneer of pompous-assery to the voices of nice sheltered folks happy to live in mental and physical bubbles. As the author argues, “When your realism involves supporting a trend that could quite realistically mean the end of human civilization forgive me for holding you in contempt.”
America is still recovering from a 2012 Presidential election in which the winner pulled out the margin of victory by running attack ads against his opponent in the swing states while 57% of the loser's constituency didn’t care who he was as long as he wasn’t the other guy. Certainly America’s majority of “apathetic” people have long since come to the conclusion that politics has nothing to offer them if the best the politicians can do is point and say the other guy is worse. The crackpot realists here all blame the millennials for this state of affairs. I’m sure that a demographic study of who didn’t vote in 2010 and in 2014 would excuse our political class’s actual behavior in some tidy-looking way.
But accepting such arguments as factually true doesn’t mean a political revolution won’t be necessary. And none of the arguments comprising the vast sea of political endorsements of what author Nathan Tankus calls “crackpot realism” will make a political revolution any less necessary. As grim reality moves in one direction while the pronouncements of the chattering classes go another way, the political revolution becomes the only thing worth fighting for.
I’ve written a number of climate change diaries at Orange, here — but I didn’t write any of them recently. But I was provoked by a diary which discussed Supreme Court review of some sort of proposed regulation of carbon emissions from coal plants.
Since the Supreme Court’s earlier (2/9/2016) issuance of a stay, Justice Scalia has died, which has perhaps changed that situation. The bigger problem with climate change, however, is that the overall discussion of climate change in America today is not yet appropriate to an understanding of the bare minimum necessary for real climate change mitigation. Climate change mitigation has been made to seem easier than in fact it is.
This thesis derives from an earlier thesis, explained in an episode of “Democracy Now” late last year: climate change is more extreme than what we’ve been told:
So if they’ve been underestimating the problem it’s highly likely that the solution has been misrepresented too.
This diary hopes to remedy that problem of thinking about climate change mitigation by presenting what I see as the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. Without this bare minimum, “climate change mitigation” will be a mere public relations effort, harmful to the capitalist economy, the working class, and the planet as a whole.
This issue is especially important in the primary campaign, in which the candidates will feel obliged to present “plans” to mitigate climate change. I’ve been looking at the Sanders plan recently — but I don’t want to go over it here, and as for Clinton, I’m just not sure. If we’re going to discuss climate change in the context of the Democratic Party primaries, let’s start by discussing how the candidates themselves have discussed climate change far more often than the moderators of the debates between them. If anyone in this election is reluctant to discuss climate change, it’s the self-appointed election gatekeepers.
At any rate, readers should approach all candidate plans skeptically — it hardly makes sense to take a candidate’s plan at face value if the basis for climate change mitigation is poorly known. In this regard, I’ve written these precepts without regard to what is “politically realistic” — rather, what’s important to me, here, is whether or not actual climate change mitigation can take place, as an alternative to the “climate change mitigation” we are likely to see, which will be merely a public relations gesture.
Here are some precepts to follow in understanding what will be required:
(Educated Marxists will recognize the title of this "new essay" as riffing off of Marx's eleven Theses on Feuerbach. For Marx, writing in 1845, this text represents a final break from Feuerbach's contemplative materialism and an embrace of historical materialism, a doctrine familiar in name but not in spirit to those for whom this "new essay" is written.)
1) The anti-Sanders sectarians, regardless of their claims to represent socialism as defined through historical materialism, would rather see the Sanders campaign die because they feel that they and they alone deserve to be at the front of the working class parade. In this regard no parade at all is better than a "pseudo-revolutionary" one. This position represents a vanguardist anti-materialism; having lost the war of position, the anti-Sanders sectarians offer a reformulation of historical materialism as being about them, in the same sense in which the feminism of the Hillary Clinton camp is about Hillary Clinton.
2) Historical materialism is not about contemplation of the vanguard in its mission to bring into being a revolution based on the correct political line. Historical materialism starts by reflecting upon the working class, as a product of the usual unities -- history, ecology, Gaia, political economy, and so on. In this regard "Sanders" represents a specific piece in a much larger puzzle, for his ability to rouse the American working class at this time toward goals more meaningful in terms of their own well-being than those of, say, arena rock, televised sports, or even production for the greater glory and profits of the 1%. (Marxism thinks of these formations as the “relations of production”; Guy Debord thought of the phenomena as “spectacles,” Victor Turner called them “communitas.”) Historical materialism does not join Bernie Sanders in his particular struggle, but rather seeks a theoretical vantage point upon the whole, of which "Sanders" represents a part.
3) "Politics" is not obliged to be meaningful in terms recognizable by historical materialists. Neoliberal regimes, for instance, are mere caretakers of the profit margins of the owning class, flying the flag of the Mont Pelerin Society. In this regard the Reaganesque slogan "smaller government" really means "less meaningful government," and neoliberalism represents a last hurrah of capitalism. "Sanders" is meaningful through Bernie Sanders' best political promises: political revolution, College for All, single-payer health coverage, expansion of Social Security and so on. These promises can be encapsulated as expressions of a single term, social democracy, which Bernie Sanders characterizes as "socialism."
4) Sanders, himself, is a Right deviationist -- his career dotted by some ugly compromises here and there, his main proposals are in the mainstream of New Deal social democracy. Sanders' earlier vogue in capitalist political economy (backed by "Modern Monetary Theory") represents both the full flower of an earlier (mid 20th century) era of capital's appropriation of the world and an attempt to rebrand some modest reforms as "socialism." This is Right deviationism rather than historical materialism not because it isn't humanistic, which it is, but because it is ultimately based upon nostalgia.
5) Nostalgia for the Golden Age of Capitalism (1948-1973) will play out dialectically with the other forces guaranteeing neoliberal hegemony. The most likely result of this dialectic, forecast through historical materialism, is a series of compromises within government resulting either in the disappearance of Sanders nostalgia or its replacement by something else.
6) The world is far more plagued by what Jason W. Moore calls "negative value" than it was when Sanders' capitalist political economy was in vogue. It is far later in the game for capitalism than it was in the era of the New Deal or of the Great Society. Thus what is more likely to prove useful in the world to come is Sanders' humanistic instincts rather than his ideas of political economy. We are not on the verge of a new era of economic growth reminiscent of the Sixties, because the "cheap nature" of the Sixties is not coming back. Rather, the struggle will be one of saving humanity while capitalism falters.
7) Sanders' promises, then, are a mere starting point; their ending point, however, will not be seen through sectarian doctrine, but rather through historical materialism.
8) The Sanders campaign appears as a social-democratic revolt against neoliberal political economy, after that which once took shape in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan revolt faltered, however, amidst low oil prices after Chavez' death; for Venezuela socialist power remained dependent upon the capitalist power of the oil economy. The Sanders "political revolution" will succeed to the extent to which it replaces capitalist power with socialist power, and falter when capitalist power reasserts itself.
9) If the "political revolution" fails to secure Sanders' nomination, what will be left behind will be a surplus of political meaning above and beyond the usual neoliberal public relations show. Whether this surplus can be organized as a mass movement of any sort is anyone's guess. One thing is clear in the context of historical materialism, though; the "revolt of nature" must attain some form of social organization if the capitalist system is not merely to attain its bad end in the exhaustion of nature.
10) The Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders' temporary resting-place, is also a credible hub of discontent with the status quo. This discontent, however, is meaningful to the extent to which it is based on discontent with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party as it exists today, then, is not the ultimate form of organization which will avert the exhaustion of nature.
11) The Sanders campaign has given America something resembling meaning to its political activity; the point, however, is to change the world.
The topic of this diary will be the Washington Post’s recent editorial board’s piece, “Bernie Sanders' Fiction-Filled Campaign.” Here I hope to examine the main arguments presented by the good people at the Washington Post. Below I’ve blockquoted, and responded to, the WaPo’s main arguments.
Let’s begin. Against the Sanders plan for reining in the banks, the editorial board says:
Here is a reality check: Wall Street has already undergone a round of reform, significantly reducing the risks big banks pose to the financial system.
The editorial board at WaPo doesn’t really examine the Sanders argument, undergirding the candidate’s plan, that the regulatory bodies are affected by regulatory capture — which is to say that the regulators and the regulated are drawn from the same pool of people, and so current regulation still fails to curb “too big to fail.” James Kwak confronts the problem of regulatory capture in his critique of the "Clinton Plan" for dealing with banks. Writing more rules which won’t be enforced, he argues, just extends the fiction that they will be enforced. Do the Post board members think there is no regulatory capture at work within the system, and that the Fed really is keeping the banks in line?
And then I have to ask about this one:
The evolution and structure of the world economy, not mere corporate deck-stacking, explained many of the big economic challenges the country still faces.
So there are maybe about 80 people as rich as half the world. We can call it “evolution and structure,” or “deck-stacking,” but the real question is one of whether or not we support or oppose it.
The editorial continues with a discussion of Sanders’ ideas on health care:
He admits that he would have to raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for his universal, Medicare-for-all health-care plan, and he promises massive savings on health-care costs that would translate into generous benefits for ordinary people, putting them well ahead, on net. But he does not adequately explain where those massive savings would come from.
It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to figure out, in defense of Sanders, how the rest of the industrialized world (or at least that portion of it with single-payer health planning) pays significantly less for its medical care than does the United States. Plenty of work on this matter has already been done.
He would be a braver truth-teller if he explained how he would go about rationing health care like European countries do.
Here in the US the consumers do their own rationing, skipping needed medical services because the deductibles are too high. Meanwhile Canada is rationing non-necessary procedures while using need, and not financial status, as a criterion for rationing. Is it not rationing if you can’t afford it?
Meanwhile, when asked how Mr. Sanders would tackle future deficits, as he would already be raising taxes for health-care expansion and the rest of his program, his advisers claimed that more government spending “will result in higher growth, which will improve our fiscal situation.” This resembles Republican arguments that tax cuts will juice the economy and pay for themselves — and is equally fanciful.
What’s fanciful is the “omigod deficits” argument the Washington Post borrows from the Peterson Foundation. Why again are we supposed to worry about deficits? Drastically reducing them is a good way to tank the economy. Is it that the masses need to remain poor or something, so their government can’t spend money on them?
Mr. Sanders tops off his narrative with a deus ex machina: He assures Democrats concerned about the political obstacles in the way of his agenda that he will lead a “political revolution” that will help him clear the capital of corruption and influence-peddling. This self-regarding analysis implies a national consensus favoring his agenda when there is none
I’m sure that the Important People will dissent from any “national consensus” favoring a political revolution against the present-day control of government (and grooming of candidates) by America’s wealthiest few. So what? Should we continue to have our policies made, and our candidates chosen, by billionaires? The political class of the status quo has completely failed to address climate change in any significant way, making voluntary “promises” before going back on them. Is that unimportant?
And, more centrally for my review of this Washington Post editorial, is the Sanders campaign in fact “fiction-filled”? Any movement intended to change things beyond small-scale adjustment is going to begin in fiction before it becomes fact. Before real change can be enacted it must be imagined. On the other hand, one can also imagine about what will be done in the society of money with all of those Clinton speaking fees...
The Storming of the Bastille, from Wikimedia Commons
The Storming of the Bastille, from Wikimedia Commons
The present-day context of Sanders’ “revolution”
Once upon a time, back before the present-day paranoia became fashionable, there was such a thing as “antiglobalization protesters.” More recently, there were these individuals called “Occupiers.” Now it all seems like a myth, an intimation of a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. What has filled the vacuum are three different political persuasions, as outlined in this diary:
1) Antipublic conservatives: these are the people who don’t believe in a public, or who don’t want us to believe in a public. Their conservatism is intentionally divisive, and they offer the world the ideological gloss now seen in the Republican Party in the “red states,” though not significantly in places such as California. They’re divisive and reactionary.
2) Corporate conservatives: this is the default setting for politics in America and most of the world today. Many of these people view themselves as “leftists” or “liberals” or “centrists”; insofar as they really have nothing in mind besides the preservation of a corporate order in which the working class is bought off, they are conservatives. These are the “pragmatists”: they preserve the profit rates for the corporations while buying off the working class. This is what everyone in power assumes is the main purpose of government in this era. The buyoff can be either ideological, by having everyone subscribe to an ideology (neoliberalism is still the fashion, as it has been since the late Seventies) or monetary, through social programs. Their political rhetoric can be as nice as you please; they can compare themselves to Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or whomever you please; but corporate conservatism is what they do. Corporate conservatism is so ubiquitous that there really isn’t a lot of use in putting anyone down for it; as Philip Mirowski points out in his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste, neoliberalism dominates thinking about political economy in the world so thoroughly that there really isn’t a competing paradigm of thought about present-day political economy.
3) People looking for the exit door to the Matrix. This is really a philosophical culture more than a political grouping. (The sectarians of the Green, Socialist, and other such parties don’t count as “Left” political groupings — their proud claims to being “leftists” belied by their insignificant numbers — and the sell-outs belong in Category #2 above.) The “people looking for the exit door to the Matrix,” as a metaphorical category, was what the world saw in the antiglobalization protests and in Occupy, and perhaps also in Black Lives Matter, though as regards BLM we might imagine such a group as contributing to blogs such as Orchestrated Pulse. Such people, then, are in the vanguard of radical ideas, but without significant followings. There are also a few people looking for the exit door to the Matrix, in varying degrees of seriousness, in the universities — my friend Peter McLaren is one of them. I’m sure you can name a few others. This group is important to the political revolution not for their organization, nor for the most part for their beliefs, but rather for their collective search, for their willingness to engage a process that might lead to something radically better than what we have now.
This is where the Sanders pronouncement of “political revolution” comes in. “Right” and “Left” have lost their meanings in the US context. Sanders, all by himself, is merely a Right deviationist — he wishes to preserve the existing system while smartly proposing that universal entitlements be tacked onto neoliberal existence. His economic adviser Stephanie Kelton is a mainstay of Modern Monetary Theory — in economic terms a vast improvement over what the Important People in government are doing now, but still within the orbit of “more capitalism” — I elaborate on MMT in this comment. As regards climate change, Sanders’ call for a carbon tax is, as John Bellamy Foster and others have pointed out, the best that can be expected under the existing system ( if combined with a public refund) — and it’s still not the solution.
Sanders is of course not to be blamed for any of this. He is pushing the system to do as much as it can do at this time. His ideas will maximize the potential for American social democracy in this era — while at the same time he has yet to contest with any seriousness the austerian question of “how are you going to pay for it”? In reality, a Sanders government, should it win election, will pay for Sanders’ ideas in the same way the US government has paid for most everything for the past thirty-five years, in administrations Republican or Democratic — by issuing Treasury bills and having the Fed print some money to cover their costs. A Sanders presidency, by itself, will discover and test the strength of the oligarchy — the gatekeepers — the elite few who can say “if you want to save the capitalist system, you must fatten our portfolios.”
What has the most potential in the Sanders campaign, however, and the greatest possibility for transcending universal-Right politics, is the political revolution. The political revolution is Sanders’ main selling point, and the biggest piece of evidence we have that Sanders is not going to follow the “progressive give-up formula” that “Lambert Strether” sees in Democratic Party history. The Sanders political revolution will be the first preliminary step the United States as a whole can take to move away from the society of money. Who knows what will happen when people start standing up for their rights?
The revolution-phobes are completely wrong when they worry that a political revolution could get out of hand. The status quo is already out of hand — the political and economic powers that be are already perfectly happy with an everyday reality in the US which there are more mass shootings than days in the year, and nobody bats an eyelash anymore at war in 135 countries. (Meanwhile the North Pole is melting in midwinter.) There are no secure handholds in late capitalism --no absolute guarantees for your job or for economic prosperity or for the global ecosystem’s ability to produce you a decent meal. Revolution-phobes imagine an illusory stability to the existing order.
The scariest possibility as regards a political revolution is that it will merely offer a spectacle to distract from the real changes going on around us — that there will be a lot of nice marching and petitions and town hall meetings and nonviolent sit-ins and that when all of the action has ceased the social world will retain its commodified conservatism, brought to you by Kellogg’s or whomever, while the climate change emergency laid out in Sanders’ speeches continues unabated.
In future years, the main focus of the political revolution (which will have to run past the primary season if it is to be anything at all) will be climate change. Oh, sure, we can nominate candidates who hire bundlers for oil interests and pretend that somehow the problem will magically be solved by “cutting deals” with a Republican Congress full of deniers and with nice folks who paid for speaking engagements. Maybe it will do something. But the real alternative to more of the same is a political revolution that will wrest the whole issue away from the idea that the political status quo. The blueprint for all of this is of course Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything.”
At this early point in the discussion, however, climate change does not yet have the same political urgency that it will have in the future. The participants in American political culture still possesses a common tendency to split things up into “issues,” then imagining that said issues can be resolved in isolation, one from the other. So climate change is imagined as having nothing to do with the shrinking of the middle class, the still-dicey availability of affordable healthcare, the persistence of warfare, or any other important issue. The thing about “issues,” however, is that ultimately they all affect the same global human population, on the same planet!
The holistic view: NASA photo of Earth as seen from outer space
In this regard, one of the most important observations of Jason W. Moore’s innovative book is that we can more easily understand interactions between “society” and “nature” if we see them as “bundled human and extra-human natures.” Climate change today is often portrayed as “nature” — but the commonly-expressed concern about climate change is that our human nature, as bundled with the extra-human natures of the physical world, will not be up to dealing with the problem. Once we really focus upon the problem of climate change holistically, and as a process, we should get some sort of resolution to the pressing questions of what can really be done.
Practical considerations
One question concerning the Sanders political revolution which hasn’t been addressed so far is that of how the political revolution is to become something more than the Sanders campaign. This question isn’t really a matter of a problem with the Sanders campaign so much as it’s a matter of the logistics of a political revolution. A political revolution must happen everywhere; a primary campaign must start in Iowa and New Hampshire and a few other states, and will often have reached some sort of closure long before other states will “get their turn.” In 2008, for instance, Dennis Kucinich dropped out of the presidential race long before I could vote for him.t
The dominant trends point to a grim future because they don’t indicate that the necessary changes are being enacted, demanded, or even considered just yet. Mass society still constructs the illusion that the future will be like the present. (This is not “false consciousness,” or even “mass hypnosis, prostration, and indifference,” as suggested in this "left" endorsement of Sanders, because the radically different future, which will come with the certainty of climate change, is so far only available through extrapolation.) Meanwhile, the scientists have been caught downplaying the risks of climate change all along, and the economy is still badly overleveraged. The future is indeed coming. Gopal Balakrishnan calls our current situation the move toward the stationary state:
In the absence of organized political projects to build new forms of autonomous life, the ongoing crisis will be stalked by ecological fatalities that will not be evaded by faltering growth.
There isn’t the slightest guarantee that we will be able to overcome the hold that capitalism has over us (and in this instance, what some have proposed calling ”capitalocene,” and not anthropocene, will be a geological epoch that is extremely short). Nor do we know how, in the best of cases, we might live in the ruins that it will leave us: the window of opportunity in which, on paper, the measures to take were reasonably clear, is in the process of closing. It wasn’t necessary to be a prophet to write, as I have done, that we are more badly equipped than ever for putting to work the solutions defined as necessary.
In Stengers’ ideas of the future, either society will descend into chaos or government will “solve” the problem through geoengineering while leaving the working class at the mercy of predatory “green” capitalism. Neither outcome will prevent ecological disaster.
To remedy such a situation, there will need to be three dimensions to the political revolution: 1) the dimension of education, of questioning and learning, 2) the dimension of demand, without which power concedes nothing, and 3) the dimension of actual building, of organizations for popular subsistence and for world-improvement. The new world is going to construct us if we don’t construct it.
The political revolution’s strength will come from the ability of the people to rethink the world ecologically while at the same time assuring that the will to change continues to come from the people themselves and not from some alien force imposed upon everyone “behind their backs.” The eco-anarchists have meaningful tactical tools: Food Not Bombs, community gardens, and so on. I understand that the first task is to elect Bernie Sanders. It can’t be the only task.
The benefits of singing regularly seem to be cumulative. In one study, singers were found to have lower levels of cortisol, indicating lower stress. A very preliminary investigation suggesting that our heart rates may sync up during group singing could also explain why singing together sometimes feels like a guided group meditation. Study after study has found that singing relieves anxiety and contributes to quality of life. Dr. Julene K. Johnson, a researcher who has focused on older singers, recently began a five year study to examine group singing as an affordable method to improve the health and well-being of older adults.
It is well known that our existence in this universe depends on numerous cosmological constants and parameters whose numerical values must fall within a very narrow range of values. If even a single variable were off, even slightly, we would not exist.
The “Chair Theory of arguing” is something I discovered quite some time ago in a composition textbook, Jack Rawlins’ The Writer's Way. (I am working with pages 374 and 375 of the Fourth Edition (1999), so please be patient with me on the page numbers.) This diary will attempt to explore how the “Chair Theory of arguing” could be used to pursue discussions here at DailyKos.com, especially as regards the posting of Clinton/ Sanders diaries.
Here’s what Rawlins’ text says :
The Chair Theory of arguing says your reader is in a room full of chairs, each chair representing an argumentative position. She is setting in the chair that represents your opinion. Your goal as arguer is to convince her to get out of her chair and move to your chair, or at least to a chair closer to it.
This is the basics of it. Rawlins continues:
What makes a person willing to move from one chair to another? Does a person get more willing to move if you tell her, “You’re an idiot for sitting in that chair. I can’t comprehend how anyone with the intelligence God gave a mutt could sit in that chair. You must be evil or heartless or cruel to sit in that chair”? No — yet many arguers attack their readers in exactly this way.
This is what Rawlins calls the “assault approach.” He doesn’t recommend it, of course, and I think we are justified in refusing to recommend any and all diaries which use the assault approach. At any rate, lower down the page, Rawlins says:
So, since the assault approach doesn’t work, you go the other way. You assume the reader is human like you and that what works in arguments on paper is the same thing that works arguing with a roommate at home about whose turn it is to do the dishes. For instance, you don’t like being pressured or attacked, being made to look stupid or forced to give in, feeling unheard or misunderstood; neither does the reader.
How is this applied?
… you want to send out messages like:
I respect your viewpoint.
I understand what you’re feeling; you have good reasons for feeling that way.
You’re not the enemy.
I don’t know all the answers.
We really want the same things; let’s work together.
The Chair Theory of arguing is thus appropriate for situations in which you wish to build some sort of solidarity between yourself and others who might not agree with everything you’re saying or thinking. I would think that the collective notion of “winning” involved in the creation of real solidarities would be more pertinent to real politics than the standard notion of “winning” in most arguments in American culture, which involves a lot of breast-beating and finger-pointing.
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